Sailor Moon: Small Fish in a Very Big Pond
by SeijioArakawa
Summary: ON ICE - Thousands of years after the Solar System was destroyed, amateur bounty hunter Tsukino Usagi reluctantly sets forth to cobble together a team that can withstand the evil energy known only as Metallia.
1. Prologue the First: T Minus Four Years

It is a well-known fact now that legendary bounty hunter Spike Spiegel disliked three things above all the other things in the world. These were: children, pets, and women with attitudes. Two out of the three dislikes were presently being stretched to their capacity as he stood there, taking sass from a ten-year-old girl.

Some days even legendary bounty hunters got up on the wrong side of the bed. Earlier that day, Spike had flubbed a routine bounty, made minced hash out of the contents of a convenience store, and caused an innocent hostage to be shot point-blank in the head. The correct response to such a situation would generally be to crawl off into a dark, seedy bar and drink himself into oblivion. Instead, Fate had decided he needed to take an urgent trip to a bright, sweltering desert planet.

Sand dunes stretched in all directions. The blinding sun reflecting off them was giving Spike a headache.

Legendary bounty hunter Spike Spiegel disliked children, pets, and women with attitudes. He wasn't particularly partial to sweltering desert planets either (unless they had a nice beach somewhere), or to blinding headaches.

So as a karmic punishment for his miserable performance that night, instead of drinking himself into oblivion in a darkened bar, he was presently standing on a bright, sweltering desert planet taking sass from a ten-year-old girl.

The sudden heat and illumination must be messing with my head, he thought to himself wearily. I'm pretty sure I've considered that line of thought already.

Sure, there were countless worse tortures to be endured in the known galaxy, but none of them were quite so specific to Spike's particular preferences. The only way to top this misery, Spike reflected, was if he'd also been forced to hold a yapping puppy or something.

**Sailor Moon: Small Fish in a Very Big Pond**

**Prologue the First** – T Minus Four Years

Standard Disclaimer: Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop, and Star Trek are all copyrighted to their respective owners, i.e. not myself. This derivative work thus falls in the usual gray area occupied by fanfiction. In the end, the purpose of fanfics is to enhance appreciation of the original works, not supplant them – please support the creators of the originals!

Further Disclaimer: also, don't ever load a gun with chewing gum. Do I really have to tell you this? Chewing gum is not a substitute for dummy cartridges.

Some days, even legendary bounty hunters just get up on the wrong side of the bed.

Maybe Spike was missing the necessary nutrients to think straight. All he'd been eating the past few weeks was the pile of eggs they'd got as consolation for being curbstomped by that brick of a man Appledelhi. And even those ran out days ago. Maybe if Spike had procured and eaten some fresh veggies or a nice steak, the situation would have turned out differently.

Maybe Spike was in a bad mood because he'd been forced to skip his nap to chase a small-fry bounty head. Holding up a convenience store? Definitely a guy with no ambition. Chasing after a guy who held up convenience stores? Now that it was just the two of them bounty hunting again, Jet seemed to have even _less_ ambition these days.

But regardless, Fate had decreed that this evening would all go to hell. What was taking Jet so long anyways? Just sneak into a side alley and peer through a window already! Finally, Spike's phone rang. He picked it up and listened to Jet's game plan.

"There's three guys inside, Spike. I'll go in the back, you go in the front. By the way, kick the leader in the jaw for me. He was wasting everyone's time giving a damn annoying speech and firing his gun into the air pointlessly."

"All right." said Spike wearily. Nothing he couldn't handle. He put on a pair of headphones and walked leisurely towards the front entrance. A big black guy was blocking the door. Well, a quick kick in the nads would put him out of commission.

* * *

><p>The greasy, disgruntled ex-security engineer, now smalltime bandit, had just about wrapped up his speech and was instructing the frightened clerk on how to transfer the contents of the store's cash register to his account, when the doors opened and some hapless jerk with a poofy hairdo and headphones sauntered towards a stand of potato chips. Apparently not noticing that there was a hold-up in progress.<p>

Wasn't the guy standing outside supposed to prevent exactly this sort of ridiculous scenario? Had the man got bored and walked or something? The bandit supposed that next time he took on extra muscle, he'd have to try the kind that took money in advance. For now, this just meant one more bystander to deal with.

"Hey! What the hell do you think _you're_ doing? You! Are you deaf or what?"

The intruder had finished contemplating the potato chips and continued to a stand of plastic knicknacks. Probably blaring Metallica or something similarly mind-numbing on those headphones, because he certainly didn't react when the bandit walked up right next to him and pointed a gun.

"Yo, headphone boy! Take 'em off, or I shoot them off!"

"Hey, how much is this?" the poofy-haired fellow calmly asked the man pointing the gun at him, holding out some sort of party favor.

"Huh?"

The party favor exploded in the bandit's face. A couple of blows to keep him off his feet. Then, as promised, a kick to the jaw. Several more disabling blows left him passed out with his head in the coffee machine. Chaos ensued as the remaining thugs scrambled to take down the sudden attacker.

So far, one thug (the one standing guard outside) and one bandit down. Correction: two thugs down. A mean-looking bearded fellow with a prosthetic arm had emerged from the ventilation system and decked the second one, knocking the contents of aisle two all over the floor.

The remaining occupants of the store: the clerk, an old lady grasping a bag of dog food like it was a security blanket, and a foreign-looking salaryman fellow near the back, with wife and kids (probably just tourists dropping in to buy food as they returned from a late night of sightseeing), regarded this new development pessimistically. Bounty hunting duo Spike and Jet quickly polished off the remaining thug, and things seemed to quiet down.

Jet, the bearded fellow, did a tally of the bodies and gauged the damage to the shop. Not too bad; they'd probably have enough left in the bounty after paying for this stuff to buy some good, nourishing food. That meant they wouldn't have to jump a border to get away from a cleanup bill like the _last_ two times he'd brought Spike bounty hunting.

"Right, looks like it's all clear. Spike?"

"Yeah?" answered Spike around a mouth full of some unidentified junk food off the shelf, which he was busy stuffing down his throat without the barest attempt at chewing. "Bydeway, lady, put my donut on _their_ tab, wouldja?" he pointed to the unconscious bandits as a second baked object disappeared down his capacious gullet.

As for Jet, he didn't get to finish what he was saying. A flushing sound came from the store's bathroom and someone with a five-o'clock shadow, no fashion sense, and a toque came out and stared at the scene of destruction and ruin.

Spike stared back. Was this a fourth thug, or just some constipated trucker with a bad sense of timing? he thought frantically.

The "trucker" was the first to realize what was going on, and grabbed the nearest person to him, the frightened salaryman. He held a gun to the poor man's temple.

"Okay, nobody move here or Mr. Family Man here gets it!"

He checked to see if this was sending the right message.

Okay, the bearded guy with the prosthetic arm was looking suitably horrified at this.

But the one with the poofy hair just looked at him like he was a hamburger clerk that had made him the wrong kind of hamburger.

"Excuse me, Jet."

Everyone stared at each other awkwardly for a moment.

"You said there were _three _thugs. Not four!"

"Throw down your guns, now!" the thug reminded.

"Disinformation is sometimes necessary for enemies _and _allies.." Jet countered feebly.

"Don't pull that Art of War crap on me, Jet!"

"DROP THEM!"

"And you, you take too long to take a shit!"

What kind of bounty hunters were these people? wondered the thug idly. Here he was with a hostage and they were just arguing about it like they couldn't figure out which way to load a washing machine. Out loud, he yelled for them to drop their guns again, for the third time already.

Jet dropped his gun. Spike just took his and pointed it straight at the thug.

"Don't you get it?" he screamed. "Drop your guns _now_ or it's cleanup on aisle four!"

"Well that's a real shame, but I'm not here to keep this man's skin intact. You think I'm an ally of justice, you think wrong. Sorry sir, I'm not here to protect, or serve, just in it for the money. Same as these other bastards that were robbing you. My plan is to grab these guys, dump them at the police station, and get a big fat check for the trouble." Spike proclaimed to the salaryman, with his gun still trained on the remaining thug.

"Cowboy scumbag.." hissed the thug. They were making this really difficult for themselves.

Jet tried to stammer a dissenting opinion to Spike's, but didn't get very far.

There were two options that Fate could choose right now.

(A) Spike was a cool and awesome bounty hunter. Jet was an idiot who worried too much and couldn't shut his stupid mouth even in a hostage situation.

(B) Spike was being a hard-headed impulsive idiot and Jet would chew him out about it for years afterwards. By the way, the hostage? He was dead meat.

Fate hesitated for a while and chose option (B), because in the long run that option would eventually save the known universe from annihilation, whereas option (A) would have just given Spike an inflated ego and maybe got him killed one day.

"YOU HORRID BASTARD!" screamed the salaryman at Spike, suddenly deciding to try struggling free of the thug's grip.

Spike flinched a little at this point. It turned out that the doughnut, what was left of Mr. Appledelhi's eggs, and Spike's digestive juices had decided that they didn't really like each other and were now duking it out in his stomach.

The flinching and the struggling were too much for the thug's itchy trigger finger, with the result of putting a bullet through the salaryman's head. It was a horrible sight and the two children nearby would probably end up scarred for life. The man was now quite unmistakably dead.

Well, great.

Spike weighed his options, decided that he wasn't in a good mood. After a momentary pause, he decided that the best way to incapacitate the stupid hostage taker would be to shoot him somewhere near the gut. Not in any place that would kill him, but to guarantee that the thug would have a long and painful recovery. The thug groaned and collapsed backwards into a pile of stupid, stupid junk food.

There was a long pause.

The convenience store clerk gasped in horror. "You.. just stood there. And watched him die."

The small girl in the corner was somewhat less restrained. "WHAT KIND OF PERSON ARE YOU?" she screamed, rushing towards Spike, long pigtails trailing behind her.

Spike surveyed the carnage he had just caused. Somehow, his usual line of "just a humble bounty hunter, ma'am" didn't really cut it this time. Were you even supposed to say "ma'am" to small girls? Okay, take a deep breath. Let's do this one step of a time. Ignore the screaming girl trying ineffectually to beat him up. Pick up the bounty heads (what's left of them) and dump them at an out-of-the-way police station. Get the thugs identified, get the dough out of the police station's automatic arrest machine and split it with Spike. Then get to the Bebop and hightail it off the planet. Fortunately, having to jump a border after each bounty was a bad habit of theirs, so they had the routine all down.

The gas giant of New Jupiter had a lot of moons. If they made it to a different one, that was good insurance against some zealous Spacefleet officer tracking them down and blaming them for the dead bystander. When that was no longer a possibility, Spike could do what bounty hunters usually did in this sort of situation: find a bar. A very ugly, dirty, dark bar where no one would ever track him down. Spike would find the bar and get drunk and then all would be well. A little whiskey sometimes helped the contents of his stomach get along better, and helped his head forget all of the troubles in his stupid, stupid life.

* * *

><p>"Excuse me, sir."<p>

It was a little girl's voice, plaintive, out of place in this ugly neighbourhood. Spike froze on the doorstep of the bar. He took in the girl and her somewhat distracting haircut. Maybe ten years old. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Wearing a black dress, of all things. It didn't really suit her _really _weird hair – two round buns, like blond meatballs, with pigtails trailing from them nearly to the girl's feet. Who decided styling her hair that way was a good idea? Looks very upset – probably lost her way. Now what could a girl like that...

Spike froze even further. He was pretty sure that four hours ago this exact girl had been in a convenience store two planets away. She had screamed "What kind of person are you?" and took her best shot at pummeling Spike into a pulp. Then she'd been restrained by her mother, not that it had been particularly necessary. Now she was here.

This was entirely impossible.

Maybe this was just some other girl with the same weird hair, who was lost in a bad neighbourhood and thought Spike looked trustworthy enough to help her get to the train station. No, it was even more entirely impossible for _two _sets of parents around this gas giant to have decided that the meatball-head look was a sensible hairstyle. So it must be the same girl. Spike considered the basic requirements for such an event carefully.

To get here from there, the girl must have tracked him here somehow. This was _odd_, because they'd made sure to skip the planet in such a way that even Spacefleet would take a while to trace them; and since there was a catastrophically botched bounty somewhere in this solar system every single day, Spacefleet wouldn't even have bothered to check after Jet and Spike. Unless they held some bizarre grudge on them that Spike hadn't heard about. Maybe Jet had somehow been very, very careless in covering their tracks – but Jet wasn't careless. Spike, well, he didn't care to admit it, but he could have been careless. He had sure been careless about other things today.

Moreover, to get from there to here, the girl must have hitched a ride with someone. Maybe the whole debacle in the convenience store had been a setup, and he was about to get beaten into the curb by something far more frightening than a small girl. Spike considered all the people he knew who might be trying to set him up and pondered which of them would use a dead salaryman and a small girl with weird hair to do so, but he came up blank on question two.

Finally he decided to just ask her.

"What do you want?"

Tears welled up in the girl's eyes and she lost it again.

"YOU'VE GONE AND KILLED MY DAD!"

Great, and start crying right in front of the entire street. Now Spike would probably have to go find a different bar to collapse in. At least his most obvious hunch was now confirmed. How do you get a crying girl to shut up again? Hitting a small child in front of witnesses was completely out of the question (this was one of the reasons Spike hated dealing with children). Maybe if he raised his voice that would shock her into silence. Then they could finish this conversation in the bar while Spike was sipping his first whiskey.

"OKAY! I GET THE PICTURE ALREADY! You don't have to scream it so everyone can hear!"

Okay, that got her to quiet down for now. Hopefully Spike could get this over with quickly. He waited to see what would happen next.

"So..." the girl wasn't quite sure how to proceed after her accusation. "My name is Tsukino Usagi..." she sobbed. "My dad.. was taking us on a tourist trip... then he got shot."

"Okay, what? Did you want to arrest me or something?"

"... you've got to help me! What if... what if something like that happens again?"

Spike puzzled over what exactly she meant. He then came to the wrong conclusion.

"Look, Tsukino.."

"Usagi."

Right, he should have realized from the sound of the name that she's from the moon of Nippon. Last name comes first, then.

".. Usagi. I'm a bounty hunter. Protection isn't in my line of work. How about we talk about this in..."

"... I know – let's head over that way!" she interrupted.

Spike feared to disobey, on the off chance that it would somehow make the girl cry again. They started walking in the indicated direction.

"Take my hand, okay? Like you were taking me for a walk."

Did she suddenly think this was some kind of twisted date? Spike noticed a strange, faraway look in the girl's eyes. Good, she was probably calming down. Either that or she was in shock and was about to explode into hysterics. He looked at the girl's proffered hand. A sudden image played in his mind of a hand like that ripping matter from nebulae at huge velocities, assembling dust into strange multicoloured planets, sweeping a bright kitchen clean of dust with a broom (wait, what?), incidentally crushing the Bebop under the broom's bristles like a tin can. What was that about? Was his unhealthy diet causing strange hallucinations? He tottered unsteadily, as though he were about to fall off a tightrope stretched over an abyss. Maybe he'd already been in the bar and got so drunk that instead of forgetting everything he'd now be treated to hallucinatory confrontations with all of his past mistakes, in reverse chronological order. Boy, was he not looking forward to that.

She was still looking up at him expectantly, probably wondering why he'd stumbled.

He took the girl's hand and was greeted for his troubles with a sudden spray of blisteringly hot sand.

* * *

><p>Spike Spiegel was standing on the side of a sand dune, wondering how in the Nebular Hells he'd got there. Tsukino Usagi was on top of the dune, looking down at him. She still looked about ready to cry her eyes out, but there was also a desperate determination in them. To do what, God only knows. Based on previous behaviour, she was just out to put Spike through his personal hell.<p>

Blinking sand from his eyes, the bounty hunter weighed the situation carefully. This sort of thing didn't usually happen when he got drunk. So he was probably sober and awake right now. Okay, somehow he'd been teleported somewhere else entirely, _very _far from where he'd originally been. He was quite sure that New Ganymede didn't have any sweltering hot deserts that stretched as far as the eye could see. At least this explained how the girl had chased him down, if not how she'd tracked him. That left the question of what kind of sick bastard was pulling the strings behind the girl. Who had a working implementation of (as far as he knew, theoretical) long-range teleportation technology, a dozen fusion reactors lying around to power it, and a grudge against bounty hunter Spike Spiegel that necessitated messing with his head in this manner?

Maybe Spacefleet, but if those guys had a grudge that big they usually just sent a SWAT team instead of breaking out the surreal. More plausibly, he could have been abducted by some race of aliens. No, less plausibly. What could aliens want with a cowboy? Hmm... that left exactly no one on Spike's list with the necessary qualifications.

"In case you haven't figured it out," said Usagi, "I'm a planet-hopper. This is three moons over from where we were before."

Okay, now instead of twelve fusion reactors she's asking me to believe in that vague urban legend of people who can engage in short-range interplanetary travel without the help of a spaceship, thought Spike. I give up already.

"I'm just going to ask you again: what do you want from me?"

Usagi put on some sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat against the sun. Together with the black dress (which would actually generate a convection current, cooling her down, Spike knew) this made for workable protection against the desert, though it _really _looked odd on her. So she'd come carefully prepared, he mused. Probably wearing sunscreen too.

"You're right." she began. "You're not an ally of justice. I'm ..."

She had difficulty finishing the sentence. Great, this was going to take a while, wasn't it?

"I'm sorry I said you killed my dad. That wasn't really fair..."

Well, being forcibly brought to a desert planet just hear an apology like that certainly fit Spike's definition of "taking sass".

"Look, you're wasting your sympathy on me. I assume you're here to punish me. Get it over with! Even if I didn't kill your dad, I did get him killed. If you'll excuse me, if you're going to beat about the bush like this I'd at least like a drink of water while I wait."

Spike started pulling out a large assortment of things he had concealed on his person, most of them pilfered from the convenience store. (Spike could probably have made better money as a stage magician or even a small-time shoplifter, but neither occupation had quite the glamour or the complete lack of anything resembling a work ethic that the life of a cowboy offered, particularly when hardworking sap Jet Black was your partner.) He finally found the water bottle and took a long, greedy drink. Ah, better.

"Want some?" he waved it at the girl.

"I brought my own."

"So you were going to punish me?"

"I'm not here to punish you! I want your help! I realize you're not an ally of justice.. you probably could have saved my dad if you'd tried.."

I probably could've, Spike reflected, if I'd dropped the gun. And then I would've starved five days later because the bounty heads could then hammer me into the floor and walk free, leaving me without any bounty to collect. No, there was a reason why you only looked out for yourself in this business.

"That's horrible! Do you really just think about when you'll next eat? Don't you care about anybody? I can't believe you're such a monster..."

Spike was generally unwilling to divulge information on what he cared about. He particularly didn't want to divulge anything to this person.

"Well fine then. But you know a lot of different tricks, don't you? You could have done something, if you'd actually _loved anyone _enough to try!"

"What do you think I could do, Little Miss Manners? The thug had a gun. He was pointing it inches from your dad's head. There was no time for anyone to react. Then he shot your dad, and your dad died!"

The girl winced visibly, probably remembering what that had looked like. Spike had had just about enough of this.

"DEAL WITH IT! That's how the world works. If you can't handle it, I really don't know what to tell you!"

"IF YOU'D JUST CARED YOU COULD HAVE SAVED MY DAD _AND _GOT YOUR STUPID BOUNTY!"

Great. Now they were going to start arguing about the right way to nab a bounty head. Was this really the time? He was pretty sure the wind was picking up, and with it came a steady flow of airborne sand. And incidentally, what did _love_ have to do with it, of all things? In Spike's world, loving someone meant that they would then be shot to hell, or exiled, or you'd never see them again for some other reason, all of which would just lead you to regret having bothered with the emotion.

"But still... I realize you just don't think about how to help people, so you didn't think of anything today. But still, you know a lot of things... maybe you could... teach some of them to me..."

Some ancestral memory stirred deep inside the small girl, and the silly idea she was pursuing seemed like the most natural thing to ask. She suddenly spoke with a different voice, as though she were giving Spike a command.

"And then I would become an ally of justice in your stead! And no one would have to suffer again!"

The request sure sounded ridiculous and petulant to Spike, though.

"Good God!" he yelled. "You just want me to teach you? You picked a hell of a way to ask me! The answer, incidentally, is NO, I do not do teaching! I don't do protection! I don't do babysitting! Just get me back where I came from, or at least kill me already!"

"Figure something out! You could probably teach me something. Please be reasonable!"

"I'm being about as reasonable as a man standing in the middle of a desert could possibly be!"

"All right! I'll get you home. But then you have to decide if you're going to teach me or not."

...

"What are we waiting for, exactly?" asked Spike after a long pause.

"About ten more minutes until I have enough energy to jump again." Usagi replied, with the tone of a student who couldn't remember the answer on a math test. Maybe her expression would have been cute, Spike thought, if there wasn't hot sand in his eyes right now and Usagi were doing this to one of Spike's enemies instead.

* * *

><p>It took a while for Spike to rest from the exposure, find something to calm down the epic battle still raging in his stomach, then sniff out an abandoned warehouse where no one would bother them. He fished for a pen and some paper among his copious belongings and gave them to Usagi. Both of them were now in a more reasonable mood.<p>

"I think I've figured out a good solution. Namely, you'd learn what you wanted to learn and I could bug off to my spaceship and never have to deal with you again. I have to warn you that this bounty hunting thing, it's not really what you're looking for. You've seen that we don't pay a lot of attention to keeping bystanders safe, for one thing. Even if you could learn all the moves, it probably won't make you happy, because all I've ever used my moves for is to hurt people and get quick cash. You'll have to learn how to do this ally of justice thing on your own, since I certainly don't know anyone that could teach you, or even anyone that knows how to do that."

"I don't care." Usagi said simply. "I don't really know anyone else I could ask. I'll take it."

She thought for a moment before continuing.

"It's not like the tooth fairy is going to come and hand me some magical power that can always be just be used to help people and not hurt them, or anything."

Well then. Spike gave Usagi a brief, severely edited, outline of his own life, and the particular way he had become a bounty hunter. (Condensed summary: it wasn't anything that a ten-year old girl would be likely to try.) Announced that he would give Usagi a list of people who could teach her the skills necessary to be a good bounty hunter. Martial arts, intelligence gathering, maybe even some psychology were certainly among the things you needed to know in this game.

"If they balk at teaching a small girl, tell them that Spike Spiegel owes you a life-debt. It's not strictly true, because after today is over I'm not going to owe you anything, but I think we can stretch the truth a little on this one."

He rattled off a list of people he knew who were good teachers and not likely to kill random strangers that approached them. People you couldn't find in the classifieds, who would probably be able to keep the girl from doing something stupid. Who knew, maybe they'd even teach Usagi something useful.

Near the top of the list he mentioned the last known whereabouts of Radical Edward, one of the best people he knew who did "intelligence gathering". Maybe Ed could drive the girl nuts as payback for teleporting Spike to a desert planet. Or the girl could drive Ed nuts as payback for Ed having tagged the Bebop with a smiley face so big it was visible from orbit, with some kind of red industrial paint that took ages of toil to scour off. One hell of a way to say goodbye, Ed.

Oh yes, the list.

"Got all that down? Now listen carefully. I'm only going to teach you one lesson on my own. And I'm only going to teach it to you once. So while I'm talking you are going to pay attention, you are not going to whine about how I'm unfair or how life is unfair, you are not going to act like a crybaby.

"One day a man on New Venus asked me to train him, just like you did. I didn't want to, but he insisted and eventually got the best of me. Long story. As a first lesson I decided to teach him how to beat up an enemy that was rushing at him, by using their own momentum against them. He learned the lesson and soon applied it to beating up his very first crook, hand to hand, like a champ. Mere seconds later, the crook's buddies showed up with submachine guns. And so my very first student died, just like that.

"So now I think that instead of trying to teach you about martial arts so you can be a danger to yourself, I'm going to teach you about not dying."

He took out his gun and made some unusual adjustments. He wasn't sure if it was completely safe. He fired it at the wall to check.

*BANG*

It fizzled and sort of spat a glob of molten goo at the wall. Well, that was convenient. Something to brag about to Jet when he got out of this. Jet had been of the opinion that Spike couldn't fix his way out of a paper bag.

"Observe that I am pointing a gun at you. I'm just loading it with a fraction of the normal explosive charge and some chewing gum, but use your imagination and pretend I'm about to shoot you with a bullet. Now imagine instead of a small crybaby girl, there's a bounty hunter standing there in those shoes of yours. There are at least seventy-two ways I can think of, off the top of my head, that I could use to not die."

What proceeded was an exercise so ridiculous that Spike was thoroughly amazed at himself for concocting it. Maybe the recent events had really driven him unhinged. Essentially, Spike would make up a situation in which Tsukino Usagi was about to die, mostly involving the gun, and Usagi would have to try to escape it. If she failed, Spike would knock her down onto the floor or...

*BANG*

... give her a wad of chewing gum in the shoulder.

"Pretend I shot that into your heart, so you're dead now! Let's try again."

Actually Usagi never did get to try the same situation again. Whenever she failed Spike would always add more conditions to the situation that made it even more difficult. Suddenly there would be men with machine guns looking down on her from a catwalk. Or Spike would find some soap, spill it all over the floor and watch as she slipped in it and fell over. Some of these were based on actual difficult scrapes that he himself had survived. After about five hours of this, his memory was down to particularly unpleasant scrapes he wasn't in the mood to re-enact, and even his imagination began to run dry. Then he switched to inventing completely ludicrous and impossible things. Like asking her to pretend half the room was covered by a field that would age her into a ninety-year-old woman for as long as she stayed in it.

Fourteen straight hours of Tsukino Usagi alternately "dying" or (far less often) not dying later, Spike noted that the girl looked severely bruised and exhausted and would probably let him off now if he asked, instead of teleporting him somewhere unpleasant again. It was sort of surprising that she was still awake and lucid at this point.

"And that's it." Spike said hoarsely all of a sudden. "Remember what you learned today and practice it along with all the other things you'll learn. With what you've seen now, if you had been the hostage at that convenience store you could have easily distracted the bounty head just long enough for me to shoot the bastard in the shoulder and get you to safety. Instead of struggling uselessly and getting a bullet in the head for your troubles. I'm..." it only now occurred to him to say this "... sorry for your loss."

Usagi nodded glumly, too tired to speak.

"Now I will walk out that door and" Spike hoped to God "you will never see me again, ever."

He yawned loudly. Skip the darkened bar and the hard liquor, what he needed now was to crawl back to the Bebop and get at least seventy-two hours of shuteye. That was the one single way _he _could see to avoid dying of exhaustion right now. It was, what, close to that amount of time since Jet had dragged him away from that nap and into that stupid convenience store? Sure felt that way. Oh, and he needed to mention one more thing before he went. Something that had particularly annoyed him.

"By the way..." he turned to look back at the girl. He wondered what would become of her after this lesson. To be honest, he'd sort of been making it up on the spot.

"... don't rely too much on that teleporting trick of yours. If the other person is prepared to fight, they'll be prepared to fight you anywhere you take them. But really, if you use tricks like that too much, _you won't have no style_."

* * *

><p>Usagi stumbled into the hotel room at 3am, and breezed past her grieving and worried mother to the nearest bed.<p>

"Busy. Not dying." she mumbled by way of explanation, collapsed on the bed, and slept a dreamless sleep.

A mere three months later, working under an assumed alias, she nabbed her very first bounty head. "Moon Rabbit" thus went on record as (allegedly) the second youngest bounty hunter in the known galaxy.

And that was just her supposedly "normal" childhood. Shortly after she turned fourteen, Tsukino Usagi's career took yet another entirely unexpected turn.

* * *

><p><strong>BONUS OMAKE: <strong>The next day, Spike gets home to the Bebop.

When Spike got back to the Bebop, he was exhausted and certainly looked the part. Jet was worried and curious about where he'd been and where he could have got _sunburned_, but decided that clearly he'd have to let the sorry bastard sleep before he could get anything coherent out of him.

When Spike finally woke up, though, Jet grabbed him, threw him against the wall to show that _this _time Spike had crossed a couple of lines he hadn't crossed before, and demanded an explanation of where he'd been.

So Spike calmly gave him an explanation.

...

Jet wasn't the sort of person who twitched his eyebrow when bewildered. Instead, a servo in his robotic arm came loose and twitched back and forth, making a small, high-pitched whirring noise. Jet slurped angrily at his bowl of cold noodles from the large supply he'd bought with his share of the bounty, then finally found the presence of mind to say something.

"Spike."

"Yes, Jet."

"Are you _sure_ you didn't just get really drunk and pass out in an empty warehouse?"

"I'm not just sure. I'm positive." said Spike, stretching out on the couch.

"Really? Because this story about the ten-year-old girl from the convenience store turning out to be a planet-hopper, teleporting you to Europa, then to a warehouse where you proceeded to spend fourteen hours shooting chewing gum into her with a gun as some kind of training that you didn't explain very well, it's..." he gesticulated with his chopsticks in search of an adjective to describe what he'd just heard. "Pretty implausible." he concluded lamely.

"It certainly is," Spike smiled. "But I have three pieces of evidence that show I didn't just spend the night passed out in a warehouse. Exhibit A: my current state of sunburn."

Slurp. On the spur of the moment Jet decided that if Spike wanted cold soba anytime during the next six months, he'd have to buy it and cook it on his own. Jet wasn't sharing anymore.

"Which could _easily _have been acquired by abusing the services of a tanning salon."

"Jet. Why the hell would I go to a tanning salon?"

"I don't know, Spike. Why the hell would a ten-year-old girl with pigtails show up and teleport you to a desert planet?"

"So she could ask me to shoot her full of chewing gum to train her to become a bounty hunter?"

Jet was speechless.

"Exhibit B is the gun I modified to do just that. You see, I load it like this with the standard Shrigley's brand I have in my pocket, point it at something, and..."

Jet looked horrified now.

*BANG*

The sizzling lump of chewing gum was now burning a hole in the computer's keyboard.

"Oops. Guess I put too much gunpowder this time..."

Jet scrambled with his chopsticks to fish the red-hot gum out of the keyboard, then waved the stringy lump at Spike, livid with rage.

"SPIKE! ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT? Just how the hell do you come up with these things? Just what kind of sick bastard decides to MacGyver a gun to shoot **molten chewing gum**? And the girl just stood there and let you shoot her? You probably got her seriously hurt. Was one dead hostage just not enough for your conscience today?"

"Well, she was just slightly bruised, even after fourteen hours of it."

"SLIGHTLY BRUISED? Are you sure? You better have checked for gaping third degree burns afterwards! I sure hope she was smart enough to get medical attention when she got h... GODDAMN IT, SPIKE!"

Now Jet's chopsticks were sizzling instead of the keyboard.

"And here I was thinking I'd impress you by modifying a piece of technology slightly more advanced than a paper bag." said Spike, gazing wistfully up at the ceiling. "Well, sorry for trying."

Jet calmed down, slightly.

"I don't think I'd even trust you with a paper bag anymore. You'd probably figure out some way to horribly maim innocent bystanders with it. All right. You said three pieces of evidence. What's exhibit C?"

"Exhibit C" yawned Spike. "is that if I'd spent all this time passed out in a warehouse, I wouldn't be so sleepy right now. I think I'll have another nap. Then some food. I'm in the mood for green spinach for some reason..." He went to sleep right then and there, sweet dreams of food both healthy and not so healthy.

Jet couldn't think of a response to that, and instead stomped off to the kitchen to get a clean pair of chopsticks, grumbling "Great. Gets a hostage killed. Disappears for over twenty-four hours without any warning. Shoots a small girl with _molten chewing gum_. Ruins the computer keyboard. Just great, Spike. Ruined my favorite pair of chopsticks too. I need another dose of soba."

* * *

><p><strong>Next Time on Sailor Moon: Small Fish in a Very Big Pond<strong>

**Prologue the Second –** T Plus Four Months

James Tiberius Kirk, Spacefleet commanding officer, is a highly illogical person. Five human girls in short skirts showing up in hard vacuum, landing on the hull of a pirate ship, then taking said ship to pieces with energy beams? A highly illogical situation. After careful deliberation, we have concluded that assigning the one to resolve the other would be a logical course of action to attempt.


	2. Prologue the Second: T Plus Four Months

**Sailor Moon: Small Fish in a Very Big Pond**

**Prologue the Second – **T Plus Four Months

Standard Disclaimer: Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop, and Star Trek are all copyrighted to their respective owners, i.e. not myself. This derivative work thus falls in the usual gray area occupied by fanfiction. In the end, the purpose of fanfics is to enhance appreciation of the original works, not supplant them – please support the creators of the originals!

_Aboard Spacefleet Long-Range Reconnaissance Vessel Enterprise_

Difficulties with interspecies diplomacy meant that Spacefleet's very expensive long-range reconnaissance vessels, built for multi-year exploration journeys, were mostly limited to running month-long local sweeps. Captain James Tiberius Kirk found this situation interminably boring. With no possibility this close to New Sol to do the two things he excelled at – namely getting into trouble and getting out of trouble – he had mostly left the day-to-day operations of the ship to First Officer Sulu Hikaru.

Sulu-san was not particularly burdened by this. The great ship Enterprise was mostly a giant paperweight, a white-elephant, a flying monument to humanity's... technology? No, half of it was reverse-engineered from Vulcan equipment and the other half from the few ancient artifacts that humanity had managed to snatch from the interstellar void before the other races did. Ability to waste taxpayer money? Too cynical, though artificial gravity was indeed an expensive addition. Stubbornness, maybe? That was getting close to it.

The correct word, Sulu decided, was bloodymindedness. He checked the readouts in front of him for the _n_th time. Ship on course, warp core stabilizing after a bit of a rough trip through a nebula, no one in the vicinity. Wait, there was an incoming transmission of some sort. Let Uhura handle it, he didn't want to steal her job.

Meanwhile, Kirk was in the mess hall trying to entertain himself. He had assembled some kind of tall, icy drink from toxic-looking ingredients obtained by thorough and complicated abuse of the kitchen's synthesizers, added an olive as instructed, and now stared at it uncertainly. A well-known online encyclopaedia had told him it was popular on certain alien planets and that its effect on the human system could only be described as "bracing".

He was about to take his first cautious sip, surrounded by an audience of curious redshirts who wondered if they'd have to drag their captain to sick bay in a moment or two, when the doors opened, and, of all people, Nyota Uhura came in to make a report.

Kirk supposed that if Uhura had shifted from her post as Communications Officer something important had just come through. Or maybe she'd just seized some minor excuse to stretch her legs and make an unscheduled trip down to mess hall.

"Captain, your presence is requested on the command deck. The Assistant to the Vulcan Ambassador is standing by and proposes to show you footage of an unspecified nature. They are making a rather unusual request and a decision from you will be required."

Well, this certainly counted as 'something important'. Kirk frowned. The Assistant to the Ambassador? Kirk had met him once before, hadn't he? Someone with a name that sounded like Spock. Anything worth remembering about the man's personality? Well, he was Vulcan. Since when did the Assistant to the Ambassador get to initiate diplomatic contact anyway?

"I'll be right there." he replied, tossing the drink into a refrigerator with a sigh.

* * *

><p>"Hello, Mr. Spock. Last I saw you it was at a diplomatic dinner. You communicated some interesting facts about Vulcan religion and had, uh... exquisite table manners." Kirk added, unable to think of a better compliment; truth be told, Spock had been a much more bland sort of person than Kirk was used to dealing with.<p>

"I thank you for the kind words, but since this meeting is already unorthodox a certain amount of protocol may be dispensed with. What I am about to propose, I wish to do with a reasonable degree of secrecy."

"Very well," Kirk replied meekly. "In that case, all personnel without command deck clearance are hereby requested to leave the room."

No one moved. Kirk's meekness was affected and the instruction a mere formality: anyone who was on the command deck would already have command deck clearance. Nevertheless Spock seemed satisfied with the gesture.

"About two days ago," he began, "one of our border patrol vessels had been tracking a Romulan pirate ship that had been operating near the border between Vulcan and human space. We approached and were about to engage the pirates; however, a boarding party of apparent humans had already arrived and was in the process of issuing an ultimatum. We have footage that we would like to show you of what transpired, captain, but there is a condition."

This was all frustratingly vague. A human boarding party? Were they trying to see if Kirk would react in some way that would let the Vulcans blame Starfleet for.. whatever had happened?

"What's your condition?"

"That you do not communicate any of these findings to Starfleet High Command." What? "I would like to stress the fact that what we are about to show you, no matter how unexpected it may seem, is nevertheless a truthful recording of the events. And knowing the truth cannot possibly hurt you, captain."

Kirk weighed his options. Well, it wasn't like he hadn't hidden things from High Command before. Trivial, silly details of some earlier missions, it was true, but practice made perfect in this regard.

He glanced towards Uhura. Her expression indicated that this was the _unusual request_ she'd mentioned.

Oh well. He took a deep breath, feeling as though he was about to plunge into cold water.

"I suppose we might as well look at whatever it is you've got, _ambassador_." Since Spock was performing the duties of an ambassador, he may as well be called that way, Kirk decided. Was sending an underling supposed to put him at ease and get him to say something he'd regret later, that he wouldn't have said to the Vulcan Ambassador himself? It wasn't working.

Sulu gave Uhura a glance as well, that clearly said _I told you the captain might want to make a decision on this personally_. Although Sulu had indeed been tempted to declare a refusal to Spock before Kirk got to hear of it, his duty as First Officer extended to his captain's whims as well as his captain's more sensible moments.

"Very well." said Spock. "Now that I have your agreement, I will share with you what we saw two days ago."

And then his face onscreen was replaced by views from several angles of the hull of a spaceship drifting in the interstellar void.

* * *

><p>The four figures standing on the hull were getting bored, or as bored as it was possible to be when the full energy output of a planet is being diverted into you without anything to distract you from the fact. In short, they were all quiet as they listened to the thrum of their long-vanished celestial spheres tracing out imaginary orbits. With one exception: the one with short blue hair was whiling away the time on a handheld computer.<p>

The one with long pigtails was the first to speak. "How long did we say we were going to wait for, again?"

Normally you wouldn't expect sound to carry in a vacuum, but here one girl was operating her mouth and vocal cords in a more-or-less conventional fashion, and the other girls could hear her, so clearly they'd somehow figured out a way to cheat that particular law of physics.

This was a minor question in any case. Normally you would not expect four girls in skirted clothing that resembled school uniforms (designed by someone who must have thought the purpose of school uniforms had been to reveal a lot of leg) to be standing outside in hard vacuum at all.

"Quiet. I was hoping I'd get to meditate out here." retorted the girl with flowing black hair, red skirt, high heels, and her eyes closed.

"What? That's not what we came here to do, Mars!"

Mars opened her eyes angrily. "Sailor Moon, I'm perfectly fine with the team's all too frequent use of my _usual _meditation space, but this means that I must then take _other_ opportunities to practice. It is sort of a _requirement _for my day-to-day job!"

"What? So you're doing it in the middle of a standoff?" Sailor Moon shouted.

Sailor Mars reddened and leaned towards Sailor Moon. "What makes it a standoff? He's not exactly going to try anything, so the only danger to us is if a CERTAIN PIGTAILED... Oh forget it, his time is almost up anyways." She'd been about to stick out her tongue.

"Jadeite isn't going to make it easy for himself or for us, is he?" Sailor Jupiter remarked softly.

Sailor Mercury nodded silently, glancing up from her computer.

"We're going to have to move quickly once the hull is breached to keep anyone who was uninvolved safe. He's already forced us to get violent once." Sailor Moon raised her voice and addressed an invisible audience. "And HE IS GOING TO PAY!"

They formed a circle facing inwards.

And Sailor Moon announced thus to the people inside the ship: "If anyone who is an ordinary pirate is listening, we don't have any grudge against you. We suggest you find an escape pod or an emergency respirator. However, Jadeite, the youma, and any pirates who know about the demonic goat..."

"... and STILL think it's a good idea!" Sailor Mars shouted.

"... will not be forgiven!" Sailor Moon resumed. "They sought to obliterate a planet and turn the energy of its peoples' love to burning hatred. But love brings forth allies that will defend it! In the name of the Moon, we, Sailor Moon..."

"... Sailor Mars ..."

"... Mercury ..."

"... Jupiter ..."

They raised their arms into the air, or rather vacuum, simultaneously.

"... will punish you!"

A hatch nearby popped open and some foolhardy Romulan decided he'd try to forestall the group by mowing it down with blaster fire. But they simply leaped off in different directions, circling around the ship weightlessly, and reforming the circle around a fifth figure that had been standing at the other end of the hull, idly twisting her heel into its surface. This procedure had formed quite a significant dent.

"And Sailor Venus will take whatever is left of you and punish it again!" she declared, joining the circle. They raised their arms again.

"SAILOR PLANET ATTACK!"

The pirate ship was impaled by a searing beam of energy through the exact center of the circle. When the afterglow cleared, the vessel was in bad shape. It looked as though it had been smashed by an enormous hammer, and there was a wide gash in the hull. The self-proclaimed Sailor girls poured into this breach. About ninety seconds later, a second explosion broke the ship apart into several large of wreckage and it stopped being a ship anymore.

* * *

><p>The Vulcans had not managed to get front row seats to the proceedings. The view of the girls standing on the pirate ship's hull was tilted at an odd angle and it had been shot from far away, but their footage still gave a fairly clear idea of what happened.<p>

"In case you're wondering," noted Spock, "the wreckage contained a very small number of charred, unidentifiable remains and a larger number of pirates wearing emergency respirators, whom we have taken into custody and are in the process of questioning. The recorded audio was being transmitted openly over a non-standard channel, and could be picked up clearly at a maximum distance of about seven light-seconds."

"Ah. That sort of makes sense. It's hard to tell at this distance, but it seemed to match the figures' lip movements. Could have been sleight of hand, though." Kirk noted with interest.

The reactions from the other Enterprise top brass were... interesting.

Sulu gaped at the screen with his mouth wide open.

Chekov tilted his head to one side and studied the texture on a ceiling tile moodily.

Uhura had scrunched her face in obvious annoyance.

Most of the others just contented themselves with raising their eyebrows throughout the spectacle.

Kirk looked fairly calm. He'd seen one or two things that were stranger than this. Only _just barely _stranger, and certainly not in a while. He ventured an observation.

"If I didn't know better," he said. "I'd say that ship just had an attack of magical girls."

"Magical girls?"

"A fictional creation. Generally appearing in visual media – hand-drawn animations and comic books. Never seen them operating in deep space before, though."

"Why would you make that analogy precisely?"

"Well, I have a vague idea of the distinguishing features of the genre. Costume guaranteed to appeal to.. certain sensibilities. They follow strict rules of engagement, right down to announcing that they're about to zap you. We can only guess at what was going on inside, but all that speechmaking seems to have given most of the pirate crew time to find respirators. Then they unleash an energy attack that they appear to have called forth with their bare hands. They have silly codenames: Sailor Moon.. Sailor Mars, Sailor Mercury.."

Something stirred in Spock's mind at the mention of 'Sailor Mercury'. Oddly enough he'd heard something like that somewhere... or maybe he had? For some reason it worried Spock on a quite personal level, but then he couldn't quite recall why he'd been worried and was left with only the vague sense that his usually clear and unambiguous mind was not operating properly. Quite disturbing in and of itself.

"Sailor Jupiter, Sailor Venus..." Kirk was continuing, not noticing the _extremely _subtle expression of concern that had crossed the Vulcan's face. "It fits the genre. On some of our moons the popular culture is positively swarming with that kind of thing."

"Thank you for that explanation. I will make sure to peruse a selection when I have some leisure time. However, since the notion of magic is by definition entirely alien to logic and reason, I fear the information won't be of benefit to this particular situation."

You could say that again. "Now, with that out of the way, I have a serious question for you. Do you celebrate April Fool's Day on Vulcan, by any chance, ambassador?"

"I assume you are referring to what we call Paradox Day. Within our calendar it falls on the third rest day in Vermillion. Generally it is used as an opportunity to present tests of intelligence in an amicable context, by requiring individuals to distinguish between plausible and implausible behaviour in others."

"Hmm. I hadn't pegged your people as the type." said Kirk. "Did 'Paradox Day' come early this year by any chance, Mr. Spock?"

"I anticipated a question of this sort. Rest assured that when you analyze the data you will find it perfectly plausible. I would like to draw your attention in particular to the large outflow of planetary mana at the site of the recording."

Chekov in particular looked at Spock as though he'd grown a second head.

"Permission to make an observation, Captain?" he stammered, ignoring protocol.

Kirk nodded.

"You say that planetary mana was observed at the site." Chekov addressed the screen. "But the boarding happened in the interstellar void. _That _isn't logical at all, is it, Mr. Spock? Planetary mana can only be observed near a planet. A child could tell you that." Actually, they couldn't. Planetary mana had no known uses beyond stabilizing a colony's atmosphere, so few people bothered to teach small children its more advanced properties, but still.

"We took that fact into account. It simply indicates that we are dealing with some kind of phenomenon that has not previously been observed. It is logical to change one's opinion when presented with appropriate evidence."

"Well, I already know what kind of phenomenon _I'm_ dealing with, ambassador." interrupted Kirk.

"Oh, really?" asked Spock.

"I'll leave the planetary mana stuff to the scientists. What _I _will be dealing with, disregarding the short skirts, bows, and various other, uh, ..."

"Decorations, captain?"

"_Frills_, ambassador. It pays to vary your vocabulary once in a while. Now, without all that, what we are dealing with a landing party of five lightly-armed... uh... women, that was able to take apart what you allege to be a pirate ship in scant minutes using some weapons system that Spacefleet intelligence probably hasn't seen before..." Kirk was redefining the problem into terms more familiar to him. "And presumably they escaped undetected? My gut tells me that if they'd died in the second explosion you wouldn't be bothering Spacefleet with this information."

"We have..." and here Spock hesitated for a fraction of a fraction of a second. "... specific reasons to believe that was not the case, which we will not divulge to you at this juncture. Certainly the fact that the landing was the work of such a powerful force is the most illogical thing about the situation. A group with such abilities at its disposal would generally have chosen some _other _target and revealed itself in some _other _context."

"So I'm going to be dealing with imperfect information, trying to chase down some unknown human organization with unknown motives and ties to Romulan pirates – I heard something about a demonic goat, that must have been their mutual code for something? Why thank you kindly, Mr. Spock. I almost forgot, too: you were willing to divulge this footage to a captain on outlying reconnaissance, not very important in the grand scheme of things, who won't even be returning to the area you indicated for another two weeks. But at the same time you don't want the information to be shared with Spacefleet High Command. I wonder what exactly it is you're not telling me."

Spock would have found divulging his _reasons_ to Kirk to be severely embarrassing. It had to do with the fact that Spock was, in some respects, not able to live up to being a Vulcan. In short, he believed the short-skirted girls had not died, and would be showing up again, for the same reason Kirk did: his gut told him. He had not previously been aware that a digestive organ could be used to generate information, and had a difficult time justifying his opinion to the other Vulcans.

"You will only need to maintain secrecy in the two-week period until you return to Sol Vicinity. At which point we would convey the information to your High Command in a more conventional manner and they would doubtlessly initiate an investigation. If you desired, you could then use your familiarity with the situation to be chosen to head this investigation. I will leave it to your imagination how that could be accomplished."

Well, neglecting to mention an unplanned diplomatic engagement with the office of the Vulcan Ambassador, and then revealing some random trivia gathered from the footage as though it were his own insight, Kirk reflected, would be almost too easy, which meant... Kirk raised an eyebrow.

"You want _me _to investigate this matter personally? Interesting way to bring it about."

"This is how we operate, captain. When we pursue a goal we simply remove obstacles to its fulfilment. Compared with this, suggesting you as a suitable candidate to Spacefleet during direct negotiations is actually a risky and indirect method, which could instead backfire and place you under suspicion of having initiated clandestine contact with us. Therefore you may as well have clandestine contact with us, since it simplifies things considerably."

"But why _me_?"

"A conversation this far from New Sol is unlikely to be listened in on. Moreover, after reviewing what we knew of your past record, we concluded that you were a fairly illogical person. And since this is a very illogical situation we thought you might get along."

Kirk gaped, far more surprised at what the Vulcan just had said than at being shown a video containing magical girls.

"The phrase 'to get along' has a specific meaning," Spock explained, "namely that beneficial progress would be made given the juxtaposition of the two elements. I am in fact repeating a joke that was formulated to me by the Ambassador when he approved the course of action I am presenting to you."

"I... didn't know Vulcans made jokes." Kirk noted, humbled slightly.

"I had been told that humans were unlikely to show appreciation to our brand of humour." Spock answered sadly.

"Right. So you're not going to tell me why you want the Enterprise."

"No. Trust me, we have our reasons. Now, all of the relevant data has been transmitted to your ship. Whether or not you choose to investigate it," said Spock, "I bid you good luck. Or whatever the customary parting phrase is." he added, vanishing from the screen.

And so the conversation ended abruptly.

Everyone on the command deck took a moment to digest what they had just heard.

"It seems to me," First Officer Sulu was thinking out loud. "That since we will not be able to act on this information until our reconnaissance sweep is completed, we certainly have been left a lot of breathing room in deciding how to deal with the situation."

"What was all their 'love brings forth powerful allies' spiel about?" Kirk wondered quietly. "Not exactly the thing you'd expect from people who destroy pirate ships." Of course, it fit in the 'magical girl' mold, he supposed, but love was not a relevant concept to the lives either of Kirk or of space pirates. Pirates.. were motivated by whatever pirates were motivated by. If there was any love involved, it was love of money. As for Kirk, his entire existence was defined in terms of duty. Duty to humanity, duty to his crew, then duty to Spacefleet. Yes, probably in that order. That left very little room for love, except as an occasional distraction during shore leave. Such amusements were not available aboard a reconnaissance vessel, however.

Kirk considered this and grinned suddenly. Sulu knew this meant he would now propose something wild.

"Captain?"

"Seeing as we got a fairly clear shot of their faces, I suppose we could pass the time by putting out a bounty."

"A _serious _bounty by James T. Kirk, sir?"

Kirk was a by-now-infamous figure in the cottage industry of joke bounties, the patron saint of bored on-the-ground police officers. He'd been doing it ever since he'd been switched to these mind-numbingly boring month-long missions, and ever since a video of two bounty hunters being beaten into the ground by an obsessive-compulsive geographer with a bounty on his head of a whole 50 _point _000000 woolongs had – God knows how – made its way onto video sharing sites across the system. Kirk had laughed his lungs out and then managed to arrange a series of even more ridiculous situations for whichever cowboy would be stupid enough to stumble into them. (For some reason, some cowboys hardly ever looked at _who _was posting a bounty, which meant Kirk would still be at it for a long time before they finally caught on.)

"And risk High Command figuring out that I knew about the footage in advance?" High Command was far more likely to be interested in a bounty's origins. "No, make up a suitable alias, and get some excuse to obtain any footage that Spacefleet police forces manage to get. As a bonus, any footage collected lets High Command know exactly what they'll be dealing with. Then they'll have the option of looking the Vulcans in the eye two weeks from now, grinning, and saying that they know already. And I won't have any unpleasantness about unauthorized dealings with Vulcans."

"What about Spock's suggestion?"

"Not really my style." Kirk replied. "Even if it means I lose my chance to finally do something interesting, I don't want to be pursuing devious schemes like that."

"With all due respect, captain, gathering surveillance footage from out here is going to be a little difficult."

"Then call in some of your favours." He thought for a moment. "It's odd. I haven't ever heard of a _specific _cowboy being hired to do some job."

"That would make them into hit men, not bounty hunters, sir."

"Interesting observation."

"Even if someone answers the bounty, are you certain that bounty hunters would be in any way effective against _that_?"

"But at least we'll get to see some amusing footage as the cowboys fail horribly. Could even learn something useful, couldn't we? I think I'll be going now; I was in the middle of something when Uhura called me up."

Sulu gathered himself for an all-nighter of making up excuses and calling in favours. Wasn't he just thinking that his duties as a First Officer were too simple? he berated himself.

Kirk headed off to the mess hall, to see if that drink he'd made really did feel like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.

**Author's Notes:** Yes, I've done it – I've butchered the Star Trek universe. If it's any consolation, this is the last we'll be seeing of Captain Kirk for a while. Or of Spike Spiegel, for that matter.

* * *

><p><strong>Next Time on Sailor Moon: Small Fish in a Very Big Pond<strong>

**Episode 1 –** Operation: Moon Rabbit

Amateur bounty hunters Moon Rabbit and Mars Ray make an effective team, despite their continual bickering. They are distracted from their latest bounty by the appearance of an unexpected meteorite. Only it's not a meteorite; it's a cryosleep pod containing a completely ordinary (albeit amnesiac and delusional) talking cat in need of immediate medical attention. An amnesiac, talking cat? Certainly, but Luna is not delusional! Give her a little credit, you two, she came from four thousand years ago and who knows how many light years away and she needs your help!


End file.
